The warehousing processes associated with an election are some of the most problematic and time consuming in the entire election process, especially for larger jurisdictions. The complexity of these processes increases exponentially with the size of the jurisdiction.
Electronic voting systems consist of several disparate systems including the Election Management System (EMS), Ballot Tabulators (digital-optical scan voting machines, direct-record-electronic (DRE) voting machines, etc), as well as other ancillary systems including electronic poll-books, accumulation and consolidation devices, and wireless transmission systems for results. Managing these assets can be a significant burden to jurisdictions. In addition, current voting systems rely on a disconnected process for programming the voting machines to transfer the ballot definition data from the EMS to the voting machines. This is historically accomplished by writing the ballot definition data to a removable memory element from the EMS-flash drive usb drives, secure-digital flash drives, PCMClA flash drives etc. This disconnected process introduces several failure points in the process, and significantly increases the overall effort required of jurisdictions to run an election.
Further, due to the periodic nature of elections, voting machines are necessarily stored for periods up to years in between elections. Therefore, it is desirable to produce apparatus for and methods of adequately, safely and efficiently storing voting machines in between elections.
Furthermore, in large jurisdictions having several voting machines, it is desirable to provide a means for tracking the voting machines as they are used in an election.